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Next story in Space

China has unveiled the three-person crew for its first
manned docking spaceflight set to launch Saturday (June 16) — a
mission that will send the country's first female astronaut into
orbit in the process.

The crew of China's
Shenzhou 9 space docking mission met reporters today (June
15) at the country's Jiuquan Satellite Launch Center ahead of
Saturday's planned launch at 6:37 p.m. local time (6:37 a.m. EDT
or 1037 GMT). The three astronauts, or taikonauts as China's
spaceflyers are known, include male crewmembers Jing Haipeng, Liu
Wang and the country's first woman to fly in space: the
34-year-old Liu Yang.

"I am grateful to the motherland and the people," Liu Yang said
in a press conference according to the state-run Xinhua news
agency. "I feel honored to fly into space on behalf of hundreds
of millions of female Chinese citizens."

Liu and her crewmates will blast off atop a Long March 2F rocket
and fly their Shenzhou 9 space capsule to China's Tiangong 1
laboratory module, which is a prototype space station that has
been orbiting Earth since last September. It is China's
fourth human spaceflight since 2003 and the first to actually
rendezvous with a target in orbit.

The Shenzhou 9 astronauts are expected to perform at least two
docking tests, one manual and the other automatic, and spend
several days living and working inside the Tiangong 1 lab, said
Wu Ping, spokeswoman for the China Manned Space Engineering
Office that oversees China's human spaceflight program. [ China's
Shenzhou 9 Docking Mission Pictures ]

China's fourth space crew revealed

Liu and her two crewmates are all former pilots with the People's
Liberation Army and members of the Communist Party of China,
Xinhua reported.

As
China's first woman to fly in space, Liu was selected from a
field female military pilots to join China's astronaut
corps. She joined China's Air Force in 1997 and served in the
Wuhan Flight Unit before being selected for the astronaut
program.

Another female Chinese pilot, Wang Yaping, was also in the
running to fly on the Shenzhou 9 crew. Liu currently holds the
rank of major, Xinhua reported. [ Women in Space: A
Gallery of Firsts ]

"China's first female astronaut in space … will be the 56th woman
to fly into space out of the more than 500 people that have made
it into orbit worldwide," said space history and artifacts expert
Robert Pearlman, editor of collectSPACE.com, a SPACE.com
partner site. "The first woman in space, Soviet cosmonaut
Valentina Tereshkova was launched on June 16, 1963. If Shenzhou 9
launches on Saturday, it will be exactly 49 years to the day
after Tereshkova's historic first flight."

Of the three Shenzhou 9 astronauts, only Jing Haipeng, 46, has
flown in space before. He served on the three-man crew of
Shenzhou 7 in 2008, a mission that featured China's first
spacewalk.

Rounding out the Shenzhou 9 mission team is Liu Wang, 43, a
senior colonel in the PLA with 1,000 hours of flight time under
his belt.

Major space docking test

Performing the
first manned docking is the next step toward China's ultimate
goal of establishing a crewed space laboratory by 2020. China is
the third country, after Russia and the United States, to launch
its own astronauts to space.

Fueling of the Long March 2F rocket set to launch Shenzhou 9 will
begin at about 5:30 p.m. local time today at Jiuquan Satellite
Launch Center in northwest China's Gansu Province.

"The launch of the Shenzhou 9 is a highly influential event that
marks an important milestone for the development of China's space
technology," Cui Jijun, director of the Jiuquan Satellite Launch
Center, said on Wednesday, according to Xinhua.

While the upcoming mission is China's first crewed flight to dock
two spacecraft, it follows an unmanned docking mission that went
smoothly last November when the robotic Shenzhou 8 craft linked
with Tiangong 1 after its launch.

"In the Russian and USA space programs, the most serious docking
problems have been caused by automatic docking systems, more so
than by manual docking," Xinhua quoted Pat Norris, chairman of
the Royal Aeronautical Society Space Group, as saying. "China has
taken the prudent course of verifying new space technology in
robotic flights before applying it to human space missions."

China's first astronaut, Yang Liwei, launched on the Shenzhou 5
mission in 2003. Two more missions followed, with the second
including the nation's first spacewalk.